


The Show Must Go On

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: My Family (And Other Dinosaurs) [47]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Anomaly (Primeval), Dinosaurs, Excellent Parenting, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Family Issues, Humor, M/M, Theatre, Twelfth Night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23515372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: The shouting, it turned out, was coming from the stage manager, a woman in her forties dressed in head-to-toe black relieved only by a pink mop of hair, surrounded by tables of labelled props and clutching a clipboard like she wanted to break it over someone's head. In her other hand she had an apparently useless headset, which she was brandishing for emphasis."We have fifteen minutes to curtain," she was bellowing. "Will someone - God, ANYONE - deal with THOSE FUCKING BIRDS?"***In December 2009, James Lester and his family go to the theatre.
Relationships: James Lester & Family, James Lester/Jon Lyle
Series: My Family (And Other Dinosaurs) [47]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/207005
Comments: 9
Kudos: 11





	The Show Must Go On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fredbassett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredbassett/gifts).



> A very belated birthday present for fredbassett! With thanks to Luka for the beta and brynnmclean for the specialist stage managing advice. Inspired by the discovery of Wonderchicken: https://www.sciencealert.com/oldest-modern-bird-fossil-holds-clues-to-how-birds-survived-when-other-dinosaurs-did-not

Lyle's phone buzzed for the third time in half an hour. Ignoring the filthy look he got from the table next to him, who seemed to disapprove of phones in restaurants, he flipped it over and gave it a cursory glance.

"No change?" Liz asked, as if she wasn't expecting anything. She chased the last bit of her starter around her plate, captured it, and immediately picked up a bread roll to start on that too.

"Well, your dad's vocab is getting worse, but that's about it. He thinks he'll make it here for the start of the performance." 

Liz cracked a mischievous grin. "How much worse is worse? Can I see?"

Lyle made a dramatic grab for his phone. "No. Get your filthy paws off my private correspondence. And stop hoovering up the bread, you greedy bugger, it's not going to run away."

Liz gave that distinctive half-blink she'd inherited from her father, the one that meant she'd just been caught out in something she hadn't consciously realised she was doing. She put the other half of the roll down. "You sound like mum. She said I ate like a starving teenage boy."

Lyle rolled his eyes and kept his opinions to himself. All the print-outs Ditzy had foisted on him about step-parenting strongly contraindicated criticising your co-parents, and Lyle knew James was keen to help Liz rebuild a normal relationship with her mother. But all that said, and considering that the level of mutual trust between mother and daughter had not been very high to begin with, Lyle did not think Kathy was particularly well-equipped to parent a teenager who had been taken hostage and dragged into the Jurassic, and who had then freed herself and spent an unknown period of time wandering through the arse-end of various British geological epochs on her own recognisance. Normal parenting rules did not apply. 

"Oh yeah, and you said?"

"I told her she was being sexist."

"And?" 

Liz shrugged, looking pleased with herself. "She didn't say anything."

Very occasionally Lyle felt sorry for Kathy.

"I already promised not to make a scene on Christmas Eve," Liz said, thereby proving that her therapist - who had negotiated a family lunch on Christmas Eve - was worth their weight in gold. "I'm making an effort."

"Puts you head and shoulders above most people." Lyle poured himself another glass of wine and glanced at his watch. Fifty minutes to go before the performance, and Lester seething somewhere in Whitehall at the Minister's behest.

Liz picked up the rest of the bread roll and ate it. Lyle wished he could talk to the version of Tom Ryan who had watched out for her about what she'd been like when she had first made it to the modern day; whether she had been more or less insecure about food, more or less jumpy, more or less wakeful. He thought he was seeing an improvement, but it was hard to be sure. It had been a long four months and she'd regressed significantly, if temporarily, after breaking up with Juliet. 

Parenting, Lyle thought, was for suckers. He glanced out of the window at the brutalist paradise of the Barbican, now lit by orange lamps and blanketed by a thin layer of slush.

Liz picked up the theatre programme that had been lying on her father's empty plate, and said as if thinking aloud: "Why do they call it Twelfth Night, anyway?"

"Fucked if I know." Lyle intercepted another glare from the people sitting next to them and smiled toothily back. 

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Liz announced, getting up.

  
“Don’t let me stop you.”

Thirty seconds later, Liz reappeared, going in the opposite direction.

  
“That was fast!” 

Liz flipped him off. The people at the next table looked like they were plotting a call to the NSPCC, in which case the joke was on them, because, after the death of one child and the kidnapping of a second, the Lester family were on first-name terms with the local social services. “The queue goes for miles. I’m going down a floor.”

Lyle hummed an acknowledgement, and thumbed through the BBC news alerts on his phone. The Barbican theatre’s restaurant was set within an enormous rabbit warren of concrete corridors, a performing arts complex that unfolded from under and around and within the tower blocks around it, but Liz had successfully navigated a few million years’ worth of geological time, and finding the bogs was probably not beyond her. Lyle paused, as Liz walked away, to award himself a point for not asking her exactly where she planned to go. Liz wasn’t the only one who had reluctantly gone back to therapy; it still wasn’t easy to watch her walk out of his sight. He’d promised James so many times he’d keep the kid safe. The fact that she was seventeen and feistier than an entire sack of angry ferrets notwithstanding, he worried about her. Perhaps all the more so because he had a decent idea of what might or might not have happened behind the anomalies.

Five minutes later, Liz appeared looking perturbed. Lyle looked up. “Don’t tell me. There was a queue there too.”  
  


“No,” Liz said, a peculiar expression crossing her face. She sat down in her chair and reached for her pocket, then stopped when her main course suddenly arrived and smiled awkwardly at the waitress, patently waiting for the woman to go away. She hadn’t inherited her dad’s subtlety.

Lyle hoped she didn’t have a knife in that pocket, and his hopes were fulfilled when she pulled out her phone instead. He took a philosophical bite of steak salad, and raised his eyebrows at her.

Liz held the phone across the table and showed him a photograph of a small bird with dull plumage, a red beak, and long spindly legs. Unusually, it was in the ladies’ bathroom. 

“How’d that get out of the lake?” Lyle said, taking another bite and refusing to leap to the worst-case scenario. . Their nosy neighbours were now turning their noses up at Liz taking out her phone at the table, and if they weren’t careful, their cutlery would be going up their noses too.

“It didn’t get out of a lake in the Holocene.” Liz was practically vibrating with agitation. “I saw one of these before - you know. There were like six of them on the landing, so I chased them into the loo. I couldn’t see one of the… things… but the stairwell runs the whole length of the building and there are muddy little footprints everywhere, that doesn’t mean anything. I bolted the door on them and put an out of order sign on it but -”  
  


“When did you see one?” Lyle said, striving for calm. “My thumbs aren’t itching.”  
  


“Late Cretaceous?” Liz said dubiously. “Maybe?”

Lyle dropped his cutlery. It thudded, rather than clanging, as his chair scraped back. Liz moved to get up. “Eat your dinner. You might not get to finish it. I’ll call work.” 

“ _My_ thumbs are itching,” Liz muttered. 

Lyle flipped her off right back. 

The restaurant had a back door which gave directly into a concrete stairwell, freezing and partly open to the air. There was nothing to be done about that, so Lyle just kept his voice down as he rang the ARC. Connor’s terrifyingly peppy minion with the red hair picked up on the first ring.

  
“Hi, Lieutenant Lyle! You’re not rostered on this evening, are you? Connor’s just run to the loo, we’re a bit busy with an anomaly in the -”  
  
“Barbican, yes, I know,” Lyle said, cutting her off efficiently. Jessica Parker was sweet, but she wittered sometimes. “I’m at the Barbican theatre with Liz. She just corralled a bunch of small wading birds in the ladies’ bathrooms and she says she last saw them in the Cretaceous. Where’s the team?” 

“Ten minutes away. Blackfriars Bridge.”

Blackfriars was only ten minutes away if the traffic was good and Kermit was driving, and the play was meant to start in forty minutes. The lobby would be filling up with people having a drink before the performance. If they had the ARC team here in that time frame trying to comb the building for an anomaly, they’d also have an audience. 

Lyle swore. “Look, I’ll see if I can find and contain it. It can’t be that far off or someone would have put the birds back in the bloody lake. Let Becker know I’m onsite.”

“Of course. Anything else I can do?”

“Teleport my rifle to the Barbican?” Lyle suggested, scratching at the base of his thumb with his nails and wondering if that itchy feeling was related to the anomaly or his stepdaughter. 

“Transporter technology isn’t on the docket for this financial year,” Jess said promptly. “Connor couldn’t make the case for it with Lester, sorry.”  
  


“Beam me up, Scotty,” Lyle said, and hung up.

Back in the restaurant, he found Liz inhaling her dinner and watching out for him with an extremely beady eye. He cursed the fact that he couldn't reasonably have gone down the stairs and found this ladies' bathroom to investigate by himself; Liz hadn't said where she'd gone. She looked almost energised by the situation, which didn't surprise him, much though he disliked it. This would be familiar to her, now. From what she'd told them, and Lyle had no reason at all to believe she'd been less than honest, she'd been acting like a secondary member of the other timeline's anomaly team. At _seventeen_. Ditzy, who had actually met the other timeline’s version of Tom Ryan, was convinced that he was exactly the same person as their dead mutual friend - but Lyle knew the occasional private doubt. The fact that the other Tom Ryan had allowed Liz to run around chasing anomalies just about summed Lyle’s argument up.

Lyle was absolutely never going to admit it out loud, but Liz did look worryingly as if she knew what she was doing.

"They're ten minutes away," he said. "Come and show me this bathroom."

Liz inhaled one last mouthful of food and got to her feet to follow him out. The maître d', apparently sensing a dine and dash in progress, moved to intercept them. Lyle took the opportunity to hustle him into a quieter corner, show some ID and a credit card to leave behind the counter, and instruct the man that this was a matter of national security and he, Lyle, wanted the head of security and a couple of men to join him in…

"The second floor stairwell, on the right next to the cocktail bar," Liz supplied.

" _-now_ ," Lyle finished, watching the man's eyes flick back and forth between himself and Liz in confusion. 

The man meekly took the card Lyle offered as security and accepted his orders. Liz, blessedly, said nothing until they were outside and in the stairwell. 

"That never worked when _I_ did it," she said with admiration.

"That's because you were a kid in a dinosaur t-shirt and a stripy scarf," Lyle said, chasing her down the stairwell. In deference to James's sensibilities they were both wearing dress shoes, but at least Liz didn't favour heels. She had grown taller than both parents, and was developing the kind of presence that didn't need extra height to make itself felt: to the best of Lyle's knowledge she was still cut up over Juliet, but star-crossed or not she was also observant enough to notice the way other teenaged girls looked at her when she wore a suit. There was no doubt that neither of them was exactly blending in. Especially him, barging into the ladies' loos behind her.

The out of order sign had not been disturbed, and the door to the stall was still wedged shut. Lyle glanced swiftly around and saw that there was no anomaly, but there were a large number of dirty little three-toed footprints on the ground, faint and dusty as they dried on the tiles. 

Liz pried the door open a crack. “Look. No, stay _put_ , you little bugger.”

Lyle peered over her shoulder and saw, clustered around a toilet, several small drab brown wading birds of the kind that Liz had just shown him a picture of. “You said you’ve seen these before?” he said, eyeing them with disfavour. One of the things Jurassic Park hadn’t taught him about dinosaurs was that some of the small, feathery, bird-looking bastards were small feathery bird-looking bastards with serious teeth and claws. 

“Yeah,” Liz said. “They’re harmless. But tasty. And easy to catch.” 

“Good to know. Maybe we can just chase them into the kitchens.”  
  


“They don’t taste like chicken.”  
  


“None of the fucking things taste like chicken really.” Liz closed the door, and turned to Lyle, a question in her eyes. “Now we have to find the fucking anomaly,” he said, answering it.

Liz pointed, with one foot, to the trail of dirt. 

“Good start. What are you doing?”

Liz had opened a cleaning cupboard, and now pulled out a mop which apparently had an interchangeable head. Liz pulled this off the metal rod and put it back where she’d found it. “I didn’t like the Cretaceous,” she said.

  
“And what the hell do you think you’re going to do about that with a mop?” 

“More than I could do without a mop,” Liz retorted, with deceptive evenness. He himself often sounded like that shortly before losing his shit.

Lyle knew a momentary qualm. “Don’t get ideas, kid.”  
  
  


“I’m not getting ideas,” Liz said. “But I also know what I’m doing, okay?”

Once upon a time Lyle would just have been able to tell her not to be stupid, and she would have sworn at him but accepted it. But he’d read Liz’s descriptions of her unplanned sabbatical with and without Helen Cutter, and sifted through the detailed information she’d brought back. It was regrettably true that, except for Helen and barring the appearance of any new time travellers, Liz knew more about surviving behind the anomalies than anyone else alive. She’d ID’d the creatures in the first place, with hardly more than a glance.

“I’m just glad you’re not carrying a knife,” Lyle muttered, barging back out of the ladies’ loos and considerably surprising two elderly women in pearls and fancy beaded cardigans. “Stay behind me, at least.” Where the hell were security?

“Fine,” Liz said, and smiled brightly at the two women. “It’s out of order, ladies, I’m afraid we’ll need a plumber in, but if you step upstairs there’s another toiletbathroom just one floor up.”  
  
Lyle was already following the dirt trail downstairs. He heard Liz hurtle down to catch up with him, and then say behind his shoulder, not the slightest bit out of breath: “Of course I don’t carry a knife. I don’t want to end up like Blade.”

That brought Lyle up short. He stopped, and stared down at her. “You think that’s a real possibility.”

Liz looked up at him with straightforward brown eyes that said that, practical as she was, she wasn’t ruling anything out. Lyle grabbed her shoulder and shook it roughly. “Keep going to therapy. And don’t carry knives in central London!”

“But y-”  
  
“Do as I say,” Lyle said, thundering down the stairs after the dirt on the floor. It had been scuffed and muddled by pairs of feet - a few confused theatregoers stepped out of their way - but was still visible. “Definitely don’t do as I do.”

They ran out of dirt on the landing that opened onto the lobby, and were left with a choice between the open lobby itself, now filling up with people having pre-theatre drinks, and a well-travelled stair down to the most easily accessible set of bathrooms. Lyle and Liz stared wildly at each other and then around the lobby: Lyle knew he was thinking that these people were fish in a barrel, and that Liz probably had similar thoughts in mind. 

An usher stepped forward. “Can I help you? Sir? Miss?”  
  


“Uh, yeah,” Liz said, holding the headless mop discreetly to one side. “Have you seen a bird like a skinny duck with a pointy beak?”

“Er,” said the usher.

“It’s a yes or no question,” Lyle said. “Have you seen a bird like a skinny duck with a pointy beak?”  
  
“Not in the lobby,” said the usher. 

  
“Good. It must be downstairs. Tell your head of security where we’ve gone. It’s important. And keep people away from the staircase.”

“Right,” said the usher faintly, jaw hanging loose.

“Come on, pull yourself together,” Liz said, enjoying herself possibly too much.

“ _Liz_ ,” Lyle said with emphasis, already partway down the stairs. Liz pattered after him.

"What?" she replied, and Lyle ignored her. From the grin in her voice, she damn well knew what he meant.

"You take the ladies, I'll take the gents," he called back, and forged into the men's toilets. These were respectably full but not overflowing with people, and contained no anomaly at all; he searched them quickly, before barging back out again and waiting impatiently for Liz to burst out of the queue for the women's bathrooms. This was substantial, and everyone in it was now watching them with curiosity, so Liz just shook her head.

"Great," Lyle said, meaning _Fuck_.

Liz pointed over his shoulder and he turned to see a closed door marked Private. 

"They can't open doors." At least, if they could, Lyle would kill and eat one for dinner - whole. He'd met creatures that would and could manipulate doors, especially ones without handles, but all of them had been larger and more intelligent than a pigeon.

Liz nodded at the floor by the door. Lyle blinked for a second, and then realised there was a discarded grey wedge there. Someone had left the door wedged open.

"Oh for fuck's sake," Lyle muttered, and pushed the door open. It led to a bare concrete corridor, and was obviously well soundproofed, because once it was open voices could be heard echoing down it that weren’t audible on the other side. They sounded busy but not panicked; Lyle breathed a provisional sigh of relief. 

The door swung closed behind them, and Liz bolted it. Lyle thought about telling her not to cut off their exit, but there wasn't a cat in hell's chance he'd lead a creature back into the bottleneck of the queue for the bathroom.

"You know, this would be much harder if I were wearing a dress," Liz observed. She sounded interested and relaxed, which was nice for her. "We look like we might work here. Well, I look like I might work here, you're doing your James Bond impression."

Lyle ignored this barb with the ease of long practice. "Why would you be wearing a fucking dress? You haven't worn one any time in the last four years."

"Six," Liz corrected absently. "Not since Mum and Dad separated. I don't know, lots of girls do wear dresses." An actress bowled out of a corridor intersecting with the one they were in, wearing a full Elizabethan farthingale and a poorly secured wig. "I rest my case!"

The actress came to an abrupt halt, because she had a choice between that and crashing into Lyle. The wig went askew and she seized it before it could fall off. "Are you lost? I'm sorry, this is a private backstage area, you can't be here -"

There was a strange harsh squawking call probably never previously uttered in central London. The actress's head whipped round and the wig lost its battle with her scalp.

Chivalrously, Liz snatched it out of the air. "That a bird? Duck-type thing?"

"Yes, but-"

"We're here about the birds," Lyle interrupted, trying to project confidence and authority. "National security."

There was a short, deadly pause, which was broken by another obnoxious squawk. Lyle was just glad the birds upstairs hadn't vocalised; maybe this one was looking for its flock.

"National security?" the actress said, in tones of gathering disbelief. "A bunch of lost moorhens are a matter of national security?"

Lyle committed this excuse to memory for Jenny Lewis's sake. "Ma'am, if we told you the full truth you'd have to sign the Official Secrets Act. Show us where the birds came from."

"I - okay," said the actress, doubtfully. She transferred her stare to Liz. "Why have you got a - a headless mop?"

"I thought it might come in handy," Liz said, in dulcet tones.

The actress stared at Liz, who smiled back very sweetly. Lyle coughed.

"Right - right," the actress said distractedly, reclaimed her wig from Liz, and rushed down the corridor. Lyle followed her. 

"We come in peace," Liz muttered, bringing up the rear. "Take us to your leader."

"Liz," Lyle said wearily. "For fuck's sake."

The actress led them through a rabbit warren of concrete corridors with brightly painted walls, and Lyle's heart sank with every twist and turn. It would be impossible to search these quickly and efficiently. He only hoped to God the anomaly hadn't disgorged anything worse than a bunch of pointy ducks; he could hear shouting, but not screaming, which was a promising sign.

The shouting, it turned out, was coming from the stage manager, a woman in her forties dressed in head-to-toe black relieved only by a pink mop of hair, surrounded by tables of labelled props and clutching a clipboard like she wanted to break it over someone's head. In her other hand she had an apparently useless headset, which she was brandishing for emphasis.

"We have _fifteen minutes to curtain_ ," she was bellowing. "Will _someone_ \- God, _ANYONE_ \- deal with THOSE _FUCKING_ BIRDS?"

Oh, to hell with it. "You rang, madam?" said Lyle. Behind him, mostly concealed by him, Liz hiccuped instead of howling with laughter, and before him, the waters parted - if the waters were purely metaphorical, and composed of interested actors.

“What,” the stage manager said deliberately, “the _fuck_.”

“The birds are a harmless secondary manifestation of a serious problem,” Lyle said crisply, wondering why the hell he hadn’t been joined either by security or by the anomaly team by now. “I need to know, _now_ , if anyone has seen anything sparkling like broken glass, strange light where there shouldn’t be, or metal objects behaving oddly.”

There was a breathless silence.

“Why?” said the stage manager, glaring at Lyle like she wanted to remove his head from his shoulders and punt it from the stage into the stalls on the toe of one bombproof black boot. “And who the fuck do you think you are?”  
  
“If this goes tits up, I’ll be the person saving your life and your show,” Lyle replied deliberately. “If it doesn’t, you can forget I ever existed.”  
  
“You’re a punter in a suit being followed around by a girl with a mop,” the stage manager pointed out. 

“Look,” Liz said very reasonably. “If you were about to face unknown perils, would you want to do it with a long stick or your bare hands?”  
  
  


One of the actors shifted and coughed. He bore a striking resemblance to the wigless actress, who was now - without either a mirror or noticeable success - trying to fit the wig back over her buzzcut. Presumably they’d been cast and made up to fit the roles of Viola and Sebastian, and Viola had a quick-change doublet and hose to swap into after the opening scene. “I mean, that’s a good point, but we could lend you some of our stage weaponry, which might be better than… a mop.”  
  
  


Lyle didn’t need to look round to know that Liz’s eyes had just glittered acquisitively. “Please don’t encourage my stepdaughter, she’s only down here so I can keep an eye on her if things go to shit.”

A chorus of stifled giggles - and the lemon-sour look of the stage manager - told him Liz had pulled a comically disappointed face. Lyle rolled his eyes. “Can we focus on the essentials, please? Lights where there shouldn’t be lights? Broken glass? Weird things happening to metal?”  
  
  


“Um,” said one actor, who was wearing one grubby trainer and one yellow cross-gartered stocking, as if he had been midway checking the fit when the uproar had started. “There’s a light in the dressing room next to mine and there wouldn’t be normally. I meant to go and turn it off, but then someone started shouting about birds.”

A quietly cooing bird picked its way illustratively through the crowd near Lyle’s feet. He ignored it. “Right, we’ll try there first. What about the electrics? Who deals with the lights and things and will know if something’s amiss?” 

“The lampies,” the stage manager said. “I’ll go and find you John.” She fixed Lyle with a stare. “If this performance doesn’t start in thirteen minutes I’ll castrate you and feed your balls to the heron for _wasting my fucking time_.”

Lyle stared implacably back at her. “I won’t waste your time, ma’am, fucking or otherwise. I suggest some of your crew go and catch moorhens - there’s a bunch of them in the out of order ladies’ loo the floor below the restaurant - and you go and find John, whoever he is, and - Viola?”

The actress dropped her wig, but caught it adroitly before it hit the floor.

  
“There’s no bloody signal down here. A team should be coming to help deal with this. Go to the back entrance, wherever a loading van would show up, tell them I’m here, bring them to wherever Malvolio’s dressing room is.”  
  
“Um. Okay. But I’m supposed to be on stage in -”  
  
  


“Miss.” Lyle fed a little frustration into his voice, let it snap. “If we don’t get this sorted there will be _no_ performance and _no-one_ will be on stage. Is that clear?”

The silence was more than a little bit alarmed.

“Good,” Lyle said. “Malvolio, show me where this dressing room is. Sebastian, you get the rest of your jolly lot hunting moorhens, and get back here on time or your stage manager’s going to feed your chitterlings to her stork.”  
  
“Heron,” said the stage manager, stalking off in search of a lighting technician. “And it’s wild.”

“Whatever,” Lyle said, sotto voce, and strode through the chattering crowd after Malvolio. 

Liz followed him with the mop. 

Fortunately for Lyle’s blood pressure and the clients of the Barbican theatre, Malvolio was perfectly right. The dressing room door next to the one he was using was open a crack, and from the other side came the distinctive wavering, twisting light of an anomaly. Lyle shoved Liz behind him, and drew a concealed knife before pushing the door open and stepping inside.

None of the lights were on; when Lyle tried the switch, the corridor fused.

  
“Bollocks,” said Malvolio. “How am I supposed to find my other stocking in this?”  
  
  


“That’s your problem. Go and find the fuse box.”

  
Malvolio trotted off. Liz pushed into the room after Lyle.

  
“Well, it’s a start,” she said. The light from her phone revealed dirt on the floor, and tiny wading bird footprints; it also revealed that the floor had plenty of crumbs and stains on it, a fertile feeding ground for any small bird that wasn’t picky about dinner. Pigeons could live for weeks in here. Clearly someone used the dressing room, even if Malvolio didn’t. 

“Let me go first,” Lyle warned, assessing the circling shards of light with an experienced eye. The anomaly looked strong, which was unfortunate in the sense that it probably wouldn’t shut soon, but might mean that they could get all the birds back through it before a scene was caused.

“You’re letting me go through?” Liz said, obviously surprised, and keeping a very firm grip on her mop.

“I need your opinion of what’s on the other side,” Lyle said, fighting the impulse to tell her no, of course not, and to go and fetch Becker and the team and stay with them, stay safe. 

Liz looked pleased. “Thanks.” 

He took a deep breath. “Stay by me, though,” he said, took another deep breath, wished fruitlessly for his rifle, and then stepped through the anomaly.

He found himself on a river’s beach, brown and silty and stony, with brown silty stony water lapping against it. Small birds were foraging here and there: some like the alleged moorhens, others more recognisably dinosaur-like in nature. There was nothing large, herbivorous or otherwise, in sight or hearing; only the quiet buzzing of insects, and the occasional cawing of birds.

Lyle let out a breath, and felt rather than heard Liz appear beside him, snorting with laughter.

  
“You’re so dramatic,” she said cheerfully, swinging the mop in her hand. “‘Stay by me.’” She screwed up her face and imitated his voice. “I know what I’m up to.”

“That’s what worries me,” Lyle said, realising anew exactly how James had come to possess such a prize-winning eyeroll. “This is dangerous.”  
  
  


“I know that as well as you do,” Liz said. “I just don’t get dramatic about it.” She took a couple of steps away from him, squinting around in the bright sunshine, and Lyle suppressed the urge to snap at her to stick closer. 

“Take this seriously,” Lyle said instead. “I am.”

She gave him a curious look, which turned worried. “What’s bothering you?”

  
“We’re on the other side of an anomaly unarmed. I’m worried about your safety, or what would happen if it closes suddenly. Tell me if this is what the Late Cretaceous looks like and if you can see anything around that suggests we’re going to have larger and hungrier visitors.”

Liz shot a careful look at the anomaly. “That’s stable,” she said, a bit more subdued, offering the words up like they were reassurance. “And… yeah, I think this is right? The humidity feels familiar.” She looked around, up at the vegetation that covered the broad floodplain and meandered up to the broad banks of the river. “I don’t see tracks around, I don’t hear anything… but we are by the water?” She shrugged helplessly. “Everything has to drink.”

Lyle took a deep, sharp breath in through his nose. Of course. Liz would know that. Probably too well. “Okay. Right. We’re going back through.”

Obediently, Liz preceded him through the anomaly. Lyle stepped into the relative cool of the abandoned dressing room, and felt the sweat that had sprung up between his shoulderblades cool rapidly and stick his shirt to his back in a way that would itch in five minutes’ time. He also found himself nose to nose with Becker, and Becker’s Mossberg, which he had politely pointed out of the way. Liz had already shuffled off to one side, and from the sounds of things was explaining the presence of the headless mop to Finn.

“Evening,” Becker said pleasantly. “Nice trip to the theatre?”

“Great,” Lyle said. “Loving it.” 

“How’s the other side? Fine?”

“No dinosaurs,” Lyle confirmed.

“Dinosaurs?” yelped Malvolio, who had now shed both trainer and cross-gartered stockings in favour of his Act One costume but was still hanging around like a bad smell - method acting, Lyle presumed. “Did he say dinosaurs?”  
  
  


“No,” Liz said, not entirely inaudibly. “Pink elephants.”

  
“It’s a technical term, sir,” Becker said, in his patented bullshit Eton accent, eyeballing Liz, who grinned toothily back at him. “If you could please clear the area… sir. In fact, Miss Lester, will you escort Mr Jones back to the rest of the cast? Thank you.”  
  
  


Liz, dismissed, did as she was told. This, as far as Lyle was concerned, was a miracle up there with turning water into wine, although right now he would have preferred whisky.

  
“Amazing,” Lyle said to Becker, meaning it. “She’s been full of beans since she realised there was an anomaly on the premises.”

“And you’ve been on your last nerve,” Becker said, with (Lyle considered) excessive shrewdness. “Go with her. Wonder Boy thinks this’ll close in ten minutes, but we’ve delayed the show for half an hour, just in case. And we have a bunch of actors ferrying us crates of birdy things. Miss Lewis is going to need a production line to get them all through Official Secrets.”

Lyle nodded. “Thanks,” he said, more awkwardly than he would have liked; he still never quite knew where he stood with Becker.

Becker nodded back, and Lyle strode past him in search of Liz, the mop, and the erring Malvolio. Outside in the corridor Sebastian was waiting with a plastic catering crate full of squawking moorhens. 

“You learn something new every day,” Lyle muttered, and retraced his steps to the props area. Two of the tables had been cleared, and Connor was perched on one of them, talking at length to a grizzled older man who seemed to answer to the name of John and was probably the mysterious lighting technician. There was no Liz, which made Lyle’s blood pressure spike, but the stage manager was stalking around with her mangled headset on, looking like she had recently been balked of her prey. The anomaly was probably interfering with the headset, but she seemed to be finding people to shout at anyway.

She spotted Lyle and made straight for him, which caused Lyle to brace himself for a fight. But she stopped several feet off, gave him an appraising look, and said: “You’re the mop kid’s stepdad.”

Lyle would have paid good money to see Liz’s face on being addressed as the mop kid. He nodded.

  
“She went upstairs to put the mop back. Her dad’s some bigwig up in the lobby, apparently, sent security down to get her.” The stage manager shoved a pair of heavy Specsavers glasses up to the bridge of her nose with decision. “She said to tell you not to worry so much and she’d meet you in the lobby. Now get out of my fucking backstage.”

“Yes ma’am,” Lyle drawled.

“And enjoy the fucking show,” the stage manager said, by way of an afterthought.

Liz was indeed in the lobby with her father; she must have sprinted up the stairs and back again to get there before he did. She also had a beer in one hand, which was unusually indulgent of James. It was probably the close brush with the anomaly that had done it.

“If music be the food of love,” James said, passing Lyle a whisky he had apparently ordered in advance, which would do extremely well as the drink of love.

“The show must go on?” Lyle hazarded, taking a swallow of the whisky, letting it burn. He bumped his shoulder against Liz’s. “You know I’ve never been big on Shakespeare.”

“The fucking show must fucking well go on, going by that stage manager,” Liz said, with obvious admiration.

James rolled his eyes. “Elizabeth.”

Liz merely grinned.

James retrieved a credit card from the inside pocket of his jacket, and passed it to Lyle. “I took the liberty of paying your bills. Dessert, however, will be on the house, and served in the interval. With a bottle of champagne. Which I take to be only my due, after the day I have had, and I intend to drink it all. With a straw.”

“That bad?” Lyle said, and watched the tiredness written in the skin around James’s eyes as he shrugged elaborately and said “It could be worse.”

Lyle leaned forward and kissed him.

The play started forty minutes behind schedule, without undue incident, except for the bird that wandered across the stage while Viola was declaiming her vulnerability in the unknown land of Illyria and her plan to disguise herself as a boy to captain, audience, and stage lights. As it was much the same colour as most of the bleak shipwreck background, and considerably upstage of the actors holding all attention, probably nobody noticed it. Except Liz and Lyle, who went rigid.

“It’s fine,” Lyle muttered. “Becker said the anomaly shut. It’s closed. It’s fine. Stupid thing can live in the lake.”

“What?” James hissed very softly.

  
“Nothing,” Lyle and Liz hissed back, in perfect stereo.

The lights fell on Viola’s determination to disguise herself as a boy and seek employment, and in the shadowed gloom a pink-haired figure in black stalked across the stage, seized the bird, and stalked off again. 

“Fucking bird,” Liz muttered, in a pitch-perfect impersonation Lyle had never heard before.

Lyle choked on his second whisky.


End file.
